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Submission + - India May Be Seeking Thermonuclear Bombs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Commercial satellite images of a new uranium enrichment plant are fueling concerns that India intends to build thermonuclear (hydrogen) weapons. The new enrichment facility would allow India to produce about 80 kilos of excess weapons grade uranium each year. This is enough for five nuclear bombs.

India could blend this with its existing stockpiles of plutonium to build thermonuclear weapons, which use a fusion reaction to generate many times the destructive power of simple fusion atomic weapons. America’s first thermonuclear bomb had a yield of 10 megatons or 10,000 kilotons. By contrast, the highest yield of the five nuclear bombs India tested in 1998 was 0.045 megatons (45 kt).

Submission + - NASA merges vacuum tube tech with silicon (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA research merges vacuum tube technology with silicon to create "vacuum channel" transistors that can switch at more than 400GHz. What makes this vacuum-channel transistor useful? Speed. The switching speed of a transistor is governed by the speed of electron flow through the transistor. Electron flow through traditional semiconductors is quite fast, but electron flow through a vacuum (or, in this case, atmospheric helium) is faster still, and that enables faster switching.

Submission + - The Higgs Boson Should Have Crushed the Universe (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: This may seem a little far fetched, but if our understanding of the physics behind the recently-discovered Higgs boson (or, more specifically, the Higgs field — the ubiquitous field that endows all stuff with mass) is correct, our Universe shouldn’t exist. That is, however, if another cosmological hypothesis is real, a hypothesis that is currently undergoing intense scrutiny in light of the BICEP2 results.

Submission + - Interviews: Ask Lawrence Lessig About His Mayday PAC

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Co-founder of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig's list of achievements and areas of influence is not small. It is his Mayday PAC however that has garnered the most attention recently. The crowdfunded "Super PAC to end all Super PACs" was launched in May with the goal of raising money in order to elect candidates to Congress who would pass campaign finance reform. It raised over $1 million in the first 13 days and has the support of some influential people. With the help of matching contributions, Mayday hopes to raise $12 million by the end of June. Lessig has agreed to answer any questions about the PAC that you might have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Submission + - Computational Thinking: AP Computer Science vs AP Statistics?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "What if learning to code weren't actually the most important thing?" asks Mother Jones' Tasneem Raja. "Rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do." Computational thinking, Raja explains, is what really matters. So, while Google is spending another $50 million (on top of an earlier $40 million) and pulling out all the stops in an effort to convince girls that code and AP Computer Science is a big deal, could AP Statistics actually be a better way to teach computational thinking to college credit-seeking high school students? Not only did AP Statistics enrollment surge as AP CS flat-lined, it was embraced equally by girls and boys. Statistics also offers plenty of coding opportunities to boot. And it teaches one how to correctly analyze AP CS enrollment data!

Submission + - Smartphones Coming Preloaded With Malicious Software (dfinews.com)

Submitted by jess_wundring
jess_wundring writes: The Associated Press reports that several major retail websites are selling cheap smartphones that come with preinstalled software that could allow a hacker to steal personal data, place rogue calls, or turn on the phone's camera and microphone, with the data being sent to a server in China.

Submission + - Chile starts construction of world's largest telescope (foxnews.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The partial demolition of Cerro Armazones, a mountain in northern Chile's Antofagasta region, marked the start of constructing the world's largest and most powerful telescope, an instrument capable of capturing 14 times more light than existing telescopes.

At 2:00 p.m. Thursday, the blasting of Cerro Armazones, 3,060 meters (11,800 feet) high, removed from the peak between 25 and 30 meters (80 and 100 feet) of its height in order to create a plain some 200 meters (655 feet) long, on which to mount the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT, a project of the European Southern Observatory.

On this site will be built a structure 60 meters (200 feet) high and 80 meters (260 feet) in diameter, with mirrors of 39.3 meters (129 feet) which in 10 years will begin to explore the origins of the universe.

The telescope will shed light on the "dark ages" of the universe, when the Milky Way was only 500,000 years old, and thanks to its enormous size it could also contribute to finding extraterrestrial life by detecting whether exoplanets have oxygen in their atmospheres.

Submission + - Ocean Plastic Is Home to a Surpisingly Large Variety of Life

Submitted by meghan elizabeth
meghan elizabeth writes: The world's oceans are turning into hellish plastic-filled soups. As it turns out, ocean plastic is now home to a surprisingly wide variety of life.

In a survey of just 68 small (1.7–24.3 mm)pieces of floating ocean plastic harvested from across Australia's coasts, researchers at the University of Western Australia found a whopping 19 genera of microorganisms that had previously not been described as living on marine plastic. Combined with dozens of other genera previously described, it's becoming ever-clearer that ocean plastic has become its own ecosystem.

Submission + - Which Gaming System Is The Most Popular Your State?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today at Movoto, we published an article that takes a look at the popularity of the Xbox One vs. PS4 vs. Wii U. We decided an interesting way to do this was to examine each console's social media popularity from state to state and put it all together on one big map.

Here is a link to the article and map: http://www.movoto.com/blog/opi...

Submission + - Hacker Puts Hosting Provider Code Spaces Out of Business

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Code Spaces, a code-hosting and software collaboration platform, has been put out of business by an attacker who deleted the company’s data and backups.

Officials wrote a lengthy explanation and apology on the company’s website, promising to spend its current resources helping customers recover whatever data may be left.

“Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point, the cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in an irreversible position both financially and in terms of ongoing credibility,” read the note. “As such at this point in time we have no alternative but to cease trading and concentrate on supporting our affected customers in exporting any remaining data they have left with us.”

The beginning of the end was a DDoS attack initiated yesterday that was accompanied by an intrusion into Code Spaces’ Amazon EC2 control panel. Extortion demands were left for Code Spaces officials, along with a Hotmail address they were supposed to use to contact the attackers.

Submission + - MIT Researchers Can Measure Your Breathing Through Walls Via Wi-Fi (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Anyone who's struggled to set up a home Wi-Fi network knows that signals can be easily dropped or blocked by walls and other physical objects. MIT researchers have been trying to figure out ways to filter out Wi-Fi interference, and in the process have turned Wi-Fi signals into a radar-like technology that can measure extremely subtle movements through walls. While the researchers have touted the tech as leading to health monitoring benefits — checking on a baby's breathing in the next room, say — the law enforcement and surveillance possibilities are obvious.

Submission + - 6 Tips For Getting Into The Zone Faster (thoughtstuff.co.uk)

Submitted by tomoose
tomoose writes: We're all familiar with "the zone" or "the flow" : that magical place where really productive work gets done, but which it can be hard to get into and so easy to get knocked out of. I wanted to understand exactly what happens when we get knocked out our flow, and whether we can use the science of what is happening to come up with tips for getting into (or back into) the zone faster. These are my notes.

Submission + - Elon Musk's Solar City makes manufacturing capacity play with Silevo acquisition (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Elon Musk is well known as a private space flight entrepreneur, thanks to his space launch company SpaceX. He is also a purveyor of high end electric cars manufactured by his other company, Tesla Motors. But many people do not know that Musk has a third business, Solar City, which is a manufacturer of solar panels. Tuesday that company announced a major play to increase the output of solar panels suitable for home solar units.

Solar City has acquired a company called Silevo, which is said to have a line of solar panels that have demonstrated high electricity output and low cost. Silevo claims that its panels have achieved a 22 percent efficiency and are well on their way to achieving 24 percent efficiency. It suggests that 10 cents per watt is saved for every point of efficiency gained.

Solar City, using the technology it has acquired from Silevo, intends to build a manufacturing plant in upstate New York with a one gigawatt per year capacity. This will only be the beginning as it intends to build future manufacturing plants with orders of magnitude capacity. The goal appears to be for the company to become the biggest manufacturer of solar panels in the world.

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